Next week, I must return to Baton Rouge for my 6 week follow-up on my ear surgery. If I can work up sufficient appetite I plan to go out that evening to Brunet’s Cajun Restaurant and attempt to tackle…bom bom bom…the dreaded shrimp dinner.
What’s included in the shrimp dinner, you ask? Well, here’s an excerpt from the menu (in both English and French, of course):
Shrimp Dinner ……………………………………….. 20.99
Diner d’ ChevretteIncludes cup of gumbo, shrimp salad, shrimp etouffee, fried shrimp, shrimp au gratin, boiled shrimp, spiced shrimp, stuffed shrimp. Served with french fries or baked potato, and french bread.
Continer du gombo, un salade aux chevrette, etouffee d’chevrette, chevrette frits, au gratin du chevrette, chevrette bouilli, chevrette bien assaissone, chevrette bourree. Servir avec des pomme de terre frits ou cuire or founeau, et du pain francais.
Reminds me of the scene in “Forrest Gump” where Bubba lists all the ways to prepare shrimp. Bubba would’ve loved Brunet’s Shrimp Dinner, I think.
I’m confident you can do it, and I want pictures, before and after.
Etouffee … I need to wipe the drool from my keyboard now.
I ate it and survived. But, unfortunately, I didn’t think to take photos. There’s one course they didn’t mention on the menu, and that’s the complimentary (and complementary) hush puppies they bring you when you first sit down.
I didn’t eat everything, but I did eat some of each of the parts of the meal. The overall quality wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. This is a meal for quantity, not quality, I guess. Here are the courses, with my own notes:
1) hush puppies – It’s hard to go wrong here. I was careful to not eat too many even though I was very hungry.
2) shrimp gumbo – I like the base of the gumbo, but the shrimp had a flat texture that made it seem they’d been cooking way too long in the soup. They should be added only at the very end.
3) shrimp salad – I took the suggestion of the waitress and ordered this with ranch dressing. Really all it was was shredded iceberg lettuce, with small boiled shrimp on top. It was nice and simple, but not much of a salad.
And then all the rest of this stuff came at the same time:
4) baked potato – I got sour cream and chives, and it was your run of the mill potato. They also offered butter and cheese, but I passed.
5) fried shrimp – These were tasty, and pretty much the same as those I get at Bayou Bob’s in downtown Denver. She gave me two sauces, a white sauce I think was supposed to be tartar sauce, and a red cocktail sauce. They were both delivered pre-packaged in little plastic containers, same as the sour cream and chives. So by the end of the meal I had all these plastic containers and plastic lids on the table, in addition to remains of my food.
6) boiled shrimp – These were unpeeled, but bigger than I expected. I peeled a few and dipped them in the cocktail sauce to make shrimp cocktail.
7) spiced shrimp – I liked this dish. It was small shrimp in a tiny bowl with some onion and spices. It was similar to shrimp creole, but not quite.
8) shrimp au gratin – This was a weird one. It was a small baking dish with melted cheese on top. Once I dug in, I found some bready stuff with shrimp. OK, but I wouldn’t want to make a meal of it.
9) shrimp etouffee – This was a generous portion served over white rice. It was too gooey for my taste. I ate about a third of what they gave me, which was still a lot.
10) stuffed shrimp – This was a total waste. It wasn’t hot and crispy enough on the outside and the bready filling wasn’t cooked well enough on the inside.
11) French bread – Or, as the Bush administration called it, Freedom Bread. It was tasty, with a nice crust. If the rest of my meal was about 1/4 the size, I wouldn’t had more of this, but as it was I only had a bite or two.
The waitress didn’t even ask if I wanted dessert. Just, “Would you like your ticket?”
So now that I’ve had it, if I go to Brunet’s a 3rd time, someday in the future, I won’t feel compelled to get this sampler again. I’ll just focus on the gumbo and fried shrimp, but that’s what I get at Bayou Bob’s back home. So maybe I’ll get the BBQ shrimp like I had last time.